Scott T. Weidman, National Academy of Sciences
This award provides partial funding for a National Academies study of the research frontiers facing the combustion community, successful cyberinfrastructure in other fields, and a plan for cyberinfrastructure for combustion research which will be a more detailed and tailored counterpart to generic cyberinfrastructure planning being carried out by the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. The National Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications (BMSA), Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology, and Computer Science and Telecommunications Board will identify the best experts for the study committee, monitor progress of the study, and identify reviewers for the draft report. Additional support for this activity is being provided by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the DoD SERDP, Army Research Office, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory.
The field of combustion research has mature capabilities in high-end simulations, but extra planning will be necessary to make the leap to the next generation of high-end computing, which will likely have paradigm-shifting architecture. In addition, the costs of high-end simulations have reached the point where only a limited number of facilities will likely be available to the combustion community, and so plans must be laid for exploiting those scarce resources. The combustion field has also made some steps to establish data interoperability, but careful planning is necessary in order to build on those steps. This is a challenge that many fields are facing, and this study will thus advance combustion and other fields of science and engineering.
As important background, this study will exploit and extend findings from three workshops related to this topic: Future of Modeling and Simulation for Combustion Applications (Pittsburgh PA, February 21-23, 2006, sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory and DOE); NSF held a workshop on Cyber-based Combustion Science (Arlington VA, April 19-20, 2006, sponsored by NSF); and Next Steps in Using Combustion CI (San Diego CA, March 28-29, 2007, hosted by NSF, AFOSR, and ARO). It also builds on the NSF-sponsored research project Process Informatics for Chemical Reaction Systems (CHE-0739655).
